


Under Strange Stars

by actualkoschei



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Things Happen to Children, F/F, Gen, Human Experimentation, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Plot, Shepard Twins (Mass Effect), Tags to be updated as story goes on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 00:57:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13670940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualkoschei/pseuds/actualkoschei
Summary: The story of the Shepard twins, from childhood through the timeline of the games.





	1. Chapter 1

**2183**

Alexis had become quite used to the concept of her brother's death. There was a time when she, along with their mother, had believed him already dead, and after that, several good chances of him dying of a drug overdose or in a military engagement. But never once, in all these scenarios, did the possibility occur to her that she would have to find out on the morning news. 

 

She froze when she heard it, cup of morning coffee halfway to her lips. Standing, stunned, beside Zakhera Ward's mass transit, realising she would not be making it to the Presidium any time soon. At first, she was sure she was mishearing. But the news repeated it.  _"Commander Shepard killed in action._ " 

 

Alexis dropped her mug. The thick porcelain didn't shatter, but cracked neatly down the middle, leaving it in two pieces in a dark pool of bitter coffee. A sound tore itself from her throat, raw, animalistic. Not quite a scream, not quite a sob. 

 

People were staring at her, she knew. Some of them, friends, neighbors, people who knew her, in sympathy, others in confusion or even condescension. She did not care. Could not care. Stood frozen. 

\--- 

**2165**

They were eleven when everything started.Theo had been sick again, for weeks. Hot with fever, whiny, refusing to sleep. Alexis could feel the tension off their mother. It made her stomach twist itself up in knots. But that morning all she had for him was jealousy. "How come Theo doesn't have to get up for school?" She whined, trying to wriggle away from her mother's forceful hands in her hair. 

 

"Because he's sick and you're not. Now be a good girl." She was combing oil through Alexis's curls, and then twisting them up into puffy pigtails.  

 

Alexis pulled a face when her hair was yanked tight at the part. Her breakfast lay in front of her, uneaten: a loose oatmeal-type porridge, studded with fruit. Not real, fresh fruit, of course. The kind that came out a packet, that arrived on board the big residential ships freeze-dried, and was later reconstituted with a dash of hot water, though it never stopped tasting bland, and it never lost the sour, metallic taste of the packaging. None of their food ever did. Some people could make good things out of the dried ingredients, knew how to blend them and add spices to make the food taste as good as any that could be found on Earth or a close by colony. Hannah Shepard was not one of these people, a fact that had the twins constantly looking for an excuse to go to a friend's house for lunch, and dinner too if they could. Breakfast this morning was especially bad, perhaps due to Hannah being distracted by worrying over another bout of Theo's seemingly perpetual, evidentially source-less illnesses. Alexis didn't dare to tell her she hadn't used enough milk powder and the cereal was more or less swimming in water, not wanting a sharp snap from her mother, on top of getting her hair pulled.  

 

Theo appeared in the doorway, still in his plain white pajamas, sleepy rubbing his eyes. "Aren't you going to eat your breakfast, Lexi?" He asked, sounding concerned, even as she gestured wildly at him to be quiet and not call their mother's attention to her not eating.  

 

"Yes, why haven't you eaten?" Hannah Shepard jumped on her son's words, her eyes falling on the mostly-full bowl. "Don't tell me you're getting sick too?" 

 

Alexis threw her head back in frustration, unfortunately at the exact moment that allowed for a hair elastic to slap into her scalp as her mother tied her second bunch off. "Ouch! Because it's gross, mom, that's why!" 

 

Hannah's blue eyes sharpened like ice. "What do you mean, "it's gross"? It's the same thing you have every day!" 

 

Alexis resisted from responding that it was always gross. "It's got too much water." She said instead, the more pressing issue.  "It doesn't even taste like milk." 

 

Hannah eyed the cereal suspiciously, and, noting the translucency of the liquid therein, could not find good reason to deny what Alexis said as being true. "Fine. But I don't have time to make you another bowl without making you late for school. Take a nutrient bar." 

 

Alexis smiled, and scrambled to the food cabinet. The nutrient bars, a standard Alliance ration, didn't taste like much of anything, but it was better than watery milk. And Hannah was right to worry about Alexis eating. She was a skinny thing at that age, all bony limbs in a navy school tunic, her puffy curly hair dominating her whole figure.  

 

As soon as she had bundled Alexis down a hall to her classroom, Hannah returned to Theo, and made a disapproving kind of sound as she put her hand against his forehead. "Doctor time for you." 

 

Theo pulled a face shockingly reminiscent of the one his sister had made earlier. "I don't want to."  

 

"Well, you have to. Do you want to get pneumonia again?"   
 

He hung his head. "No." 

 

The truth was, he was afraid of the doctor. The only doctor on the ship who treated children was a small man with sandy hair and a pinched, ruddy face. Most children found him friendly, engaging, that he put them at ease. Theo thought he looked at him like a hungry predator. Privately, Alexis had told him that she felt the same.  

   
Today, the look was even more pronounced. Not only did he look hungry, he looked positively delighted when he saw Theo, and opened his medical file. "Sick again? Ah, poor kid. Well, you're old enough now to be seen without your mother, so why don't you wait outside, Lieutenant Shepard?" 

 

Hannah complied. It was for the best, she thought, Theo was getting old enough to be more independent, sickly as he was.  

   
Theo sat on the bed, legs dangling, as he was accustomed to. "It's not bad this time." He told the doctor in a small voice. "Just a fever and a bit of a cough." 

 

"I wouldn't be so sure. Many times it gets worse when you think it's nothing." The doctor told him, pressing the cold metal of a stethoscope to his chest, through his shirt. Theo wasn't sure how much the doctor would be able to hear through his shirt, but he said nothing. 

 

"Well, this time it really is nothing. I'll just give you a quick antibiotic injection." The doctor told him, with a practiced smile, filling a needle with clear liquid. The pain of the needle was sharp, and the liquid was icy cold as it entered Theo's veins. Theo winced. "Is that all?" He asked. 

 

Or rather, tried to ask. It did not come out as clear as he had meant it. His vision was clouding over, blurring, the world spinning. He tried to call out for his mother, but no sound came out. Then the world went black, and he slumped limply to the bed.  

 

Hannah was waiting by the door, pacing slightly. More tense than she was actually nervous. Until the doctor came out, a serious expression on his face. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant, but we'll have to keep him overnight. This infection could turn nasty, it's on the brink of entering his bloodstream." 

 

"What? But he's barely even feverish!" 

 

"Yes, these things can come on quite suddenly. Don't worry, I'm sure with a night of observation he'll be just fine." He offered her a smile of false concern. 

 

Hannah didn't eat that night. Alexis had, for once, come home for dinner, and ate pasta with reconstituted sauce without any complaints, her usual bright energy gone. Drained by worry. They were both worried. 

 

She did not sleep that night, either, dreading what she might find in the morning, counting down the seconds until she could go pick her son up. 

 

But when she reached the surgery, the doctor blocked her way, the look on his face somber. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant Shepard." 

 

"What?" She tried to push past him. "What are you sorry for?" 

 

"The infection was more advanced than I thought. Your son died during the night." 

 

Her world seemed to rock on its axis, the very foundations of it crumbling. It couldn't be true, it  _couldn't_ , but why would he lie to her? Him, who had cared for her children since she was assigned to this ship, when they were two years old? He  _cared_  about the twins, he wouldn't just make this up. "Can I see him?" She asked, her voice small. Already wondering if she would be able to afford to bury him on Earth. He'd never been there in life, but he was conceived there, and it seemed  _right_ to her that he be buried on humanity's own home soil. 

 

"I really don't recommend that, I'm sorry. It's quite nasty. You would be better off remembering him as he was. I'm so sorry, Lieutenant. But I think you should go home to your daughter. Break the news to her. Decide if you wish to have a memorial." 

 

Around the corner from the surgery, Hannah sank to the ground, her face in her knees, sobbing raw and painfully. 

 

\-- 

 

It was dark when Theo woke up. Dark, and cold, and he could hear nothing but the distant hum of ship engines. His throat was sore, his mouth dry, and his head ached. So, of course, he screamed. "Mom! Alexis! Dr Bennet?"  

 

There was no answer.  


	2. Chapter 2

**2165**

There would not be an answer for a long time. Theo could not measure just how much time, alone in the quiet dark unable even to see his hand in front of his face. It felt, after a while, as if his mind was trying to eat its way out of his skull, desperate for stimulation. He shouted out loud until his throat was raw, sang at the top of his lungs, his mother's lullabies and the pop songs he and Alexis listened to on the Earth radio stations. He moved around, felt out the boundaries of his own piece of the dark, the space he was trapped in. There wasn't much of it. The ceiling a few inches above his head, and if he stretched his arms out to the sides, his fingertips brushed walls on both sides. His muscles started to cramp from having so little space to move. And he was hungry, his stomach gnawing at him. It must have been only a few hours before he started crying. 

He was sleeping when the ship he was on finally stopped. The sudden shut off of the sound of engines did not wake him, and nor did the approaching adult voices. He was too worn from crying, too hungry, to be easily open.

Then the container he was in was open. Light flooded in, not natural light, but the harsh brightness of efficient fluorescent strip lighting. Cold, white, and clinical, his first thought was that it put him in mind of a hospital. 

He had curled himself into the fetal position on the container floor. Rough hands dragged him to his feet, and out. 

The impression of a hospital didn't go away when he looked around. The room was stark, brushed metal and white and grey plastic, empty but for more of the containers of the kind that he had spent the last however long in. There were two adults, the man that had grabbed him, who was short and dark, and a thin blonde woman. Both wore white coats, the kind that doctors and nurses wore, branded with a symbol he didn't recognize on the breast pockets. The woman held a pen and clipboard. Her voice, when she spoke, was far softer than the man's hands on him had been, startlingly soft, in fact. "What's your name?" She asked him, in the tone of an adult speaking to a child younger than he was. 

He might have bristled at the condescension in her tone, were these normal circumstances. But he didn't. He stared at his feet instead. "Theo." He mumbled. "Theo Shepard."

"It's nice to meet you, Theo." The more she spoke, the more the sweetness in her voice sounded fake. "Come with me now. We just need to run some tests."

He followed, he had no choice. The room she took him to was obviously a clinical room, with a single stretcher-bed, and a lot of medical equipment. Everything was, even more than in the other room, shiny-clean white and silver. 

Theo sat on the bed, feeling vulnerable. Unlike Dr Bennet, the woman – a nurse, he supposed – did not bother to explain what she was doing. She took his blood pressure, his oxygen level, and his heart-rate, and listened to his lungs, those all things he recognized from having them done before. She also drew three vials of blood. The alcohol she used to clean his arm was cold, and she didn't apologize for it. Didn't seem to acknowledge him at all, really, except to ask him to take his shirt off and put it back on, or give her an arm or a hand. There were tests he did not understand, that he had not had done before, too. Electrodes placed on his temples, a thick needle in the base of his spine that left him sore and aching. 

After that, she patted his cheek with a perfunctory sort of care. "All done. Now run along. Somebody will be along to take you to dinner."

His stomach rumbled at the thought of dinner, reminding him how long it had been – though he still did not know exactly how long that was – since he had eaten. All thoughts of wondering where he was, who these people were, what they wanted, left his head at the thought of food.

He was taken to a larger room, with three walls the same brushed metal, and one wall entirely a mirror. The room was filled with long tables, at which sat other children, some of them around his age, most seeming to be younger. The other children all wore a uniform, white, long pants and long-sleeved shirt that looked like pajamas and bore the same logo on the chest as on the coats the doctors and nurses wore. There weren't, Theo realized, as many of them as he had thought. Perhaps twenty of them, clustered in small groups of three or four around what turned out to be only three tables. The illusion of more had been caused by the mirrored wall. 

Put on the spot as the new kid, Theo looked around uncomfortably. Food, he saw, was being doled out on plastic trays from the far end of the room, so he went there and joined the line. 

The girl in front of him turned to look at him. She looked to be a few years younger than him, eight or nine. Small even for that age, painfully thin, with the kind of pale skin that had become a rarity of the past few centuries and large black eyes. Her black hair was shaved close to her scalp, and there were angry red marks at her temples and the back of her neck. But she she smiled at him with a shocking brightness. "Hi! You're new!"

"Uh..." His tongue felt thick in his mouth. "Yes. Hi. I'm Theo."

"I'm Mirin." She stuck her hand out in an incongruously adult gesture, and he shook it. 

"What is this place?" He asked her.

She seemed confused. "I think it's a hospital. They do tests on us. Medical stuff." She rubs one of the blisters on her neck.

"What kind of tests?" He asked, alarmed. 

"All kinds."

"Don't bother asking  _her_ , she doesn't know." The girl in front of Mirin, who looked to be of an age with Theo, cut in. "She's too young."

"Hey!" Mirin protested. "I'm old enough!"

The older girl ignored her. "Biotic tests. You're a biotic, aren't you? They want to see what we could do." She seemed proud of herself. She had dirty blond hair, and skin perhaps a shade darker than Theo's own. 

"Yes." Theo admitted. "What for, though?"

The girl tossed her head. "For the future of humanity. That's what they say, anyway." Then it was her turn to be served food, and she turned away from them.

"That's Haylen." Mirin said. Her voice, he now noticed, though he had not before, was very soft. "She's always like that."

Theo laughed, despite himself, but his mirth vanished just as fast. "Is it true, what she says?"

"That we're biotic? Yeah." There was no pride in her dark eyes, though, and she was stilling rubbing her neck. "The tests hurt." She was whispering now, as though it were a big secret she was telling him. 

He wondered why, until he felt the nurse's sharp eyes on them. Shivers when down his spine. Perhaps, he thought, he wasn't meant to know that.


End file.
